


To Stand In Borrowed Colors

by bmouse



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Another Molly Gets Rezzed AU, Found Family Feels, M/M, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-27
Updated: 2019-01-26
Packaged: 2019-10-17 10:41:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17558831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bmouse/pseuds/bmouse
Summary: Caleb has one of his little episodes and steals a dead tiefling's coat.Oddly enough, things get better from there on out.





	To Stand In Borrowed Colors

**Author's Note:**

> So I was scrolling through Tumblr at some point and I saw a fanart of Beau wearing Molly's coat and I thought 'oh shit that's amazing! so sad that we didn't get that in canon...' and then I saw some art of //Caleb// wearing Molly's coat and I thought 'why/how the fuck would that happen?....wait that's really compelling!' and then this AU began chewing on my brain. As long as people don't expect this story to strictly follow canon (esp after the 'M9 Become The World's Worst Accidental Pirates' episode) we should all have some fun~
> 
> Tags will be updated as other characters enter the story. Also hey, Alive!Molly is gonna be a thing eventually.

About twenty paces after they'd turned their backs to the grave Beau heard Caleb swear, something low and Zemnian like an angry cough. 

With a whirl of snow-packed dirt he wheeled around and stalked past her. 

Beau did fuck-all to stop him. 

Mostly she just sort of stood there like a de-stringed mummer’s puppet, her eyes fixed themselves to a flutter of bandages at his wrist. Funerals man, really took it out of ya. And anyway bandages were a useful thing to think about. They hadn’t brought spares with them. Five idiots jumping an armed gang of professional slavers and not a healing kit between them.

Bandages. Yep. The ones around Caleb’s wrist and the ones around her ankle…

Those bandages had come from Molly's shirt. She’d cut strips of it away from the non-bloodied bits before they buried him and hysterically thought: ‘Well that fucker’s off to meet the Raven Queen with his pretty purple stomach on display! Fine! OK! He’d probably be into that.’

There were all these things, yannow? All these ancient sutras and meditations on battle and grief and loss and being gentle and unequivocal about your own eventual death.

Beau had loved falling asleep in that class. 

It was all bullshit. Too theoretical. Initiates of the Cobalt Soul were hardly ever sent out to deal with anything dangerous alone and if her mindless, boot-licking fellow novices went out in a pack and collectively kicked the bucket she’d probably point and smirk. 

That’s what she’d thought anyway.

Nothing had prepared her for kneeling in the dirt, beat-to-shit and wanting to laugh out loud at the mental image of Mollymauk Tealeaf gyrating flirtatiously at the Winged Reapers in only the top half of a bloody shirt. 

Mollymauk. Molly. Who was dead now.

And now she was frozen on the road and next time shit went south someone else from the Nein might have a blue bandage made from her own ripped-up sash. 

And for a moment it was like the fucking sutras had worked after all, like they’d crawled their way through her nose and into her brain with every droning chant. Because she was OK with it. The circle, the blue sphere of Eternity. When Beauregard Lionett would stop moving her friends could use her sash for bandages. Caleb, with his shitty fellow-Human eyes, could take her night vision goggles. She wouldn’t go to waste. 

There was something like peace. Around that. 

The feeling lasted about half a breath.

And then her heart started kicking urgently in her chest like a temple drum and just like that she was fucking terrified. She needed a drink. She needed something to hit. She needed to be 100 miles out of this shitty town, like, yesterday. 

Besides, maybe it would be Jester who ended up with her bandages and then the two kinds of blue would really fucking clash. 

_See?_ See _? I can’t die yet._

A little air came out of her nose. Guess that’s what passed for a laugh these days. Anyway, it was cold. They had to keep going. As soon as a certain awkward ginger bastard quit holding them all up.

Like he’d been summoned Caleb came back, skuling into her field of vision. He had a familiar brightly-colored bunde under his arm and beagan stuffing it quickly and viciously into his worn leather satchel. 

Nott was watching him with a kind of sad understanding look. 

Beau’s brain broke a little.

"Really?" she rounded on him "Fucking _really?_ You already got his necklace.What the fuck are you going to do with _that_? Take it out late at night and stare at it and cry?"

For once, Caleb drew himself up out of his slouch. Weird, she forgot that he was technically a little taller than her.

"I-I had a thought, you know. I just had a thought - what if some of their stragglers were behind the main convoy. What if a week from now we see some petty bandit _valtszing_ around in-" 

He cut himself off, self-consciously. His head was shaking back and forth a little, like he was avoiding eye-contact with the ground now. 

Beau’s brain sent her a sudden keen reminder that Caleb was, technically - crazy. Actually not right in the head. From all the fucked up shit that happened to him. You know, that shit. And the real polite thing would have been to just forget it and try to go on like normal, as if he hadn’t told her any of it, but to her embarrassment she’d been treating him a little differently since then, a little more with kid gloves. Which is why she stood there and let him work it out. 

Eventually he took a heavy breath and grimaced, like it was really that difficult to force himself to keep talking.

"Ja, ja, I know. _I know._ It doesn’t look good. And It’s all very... _fucking_ _sentimental_. But it’s… it’s good cloth. And _I_ know the road. And on a road like _this,_ to a town like _that-”_ he thrust his chin up, stubbornly “it would not stay." 

And then Caleb looked right at her with his sunken hobo eyes. The tear tracks had made the dirt in the corners stand out more.

Beau, never-hungry Beau, Beau who was born in a big warm house and then shipped off to a big warm monastery, couldn't really say anything to that. 

So she shrugged and she flinched a little and she walked on faster, keeping herself on his left side so that she wouldn’t see a few stray red-and-purple threads drifting behind him with every step they took. After a while Nott switched places with her without saying anything.

She kept her eyes to the trees, her muscles were already tight, searching for the inevitable ambush. 

Beau was ready. She was fucking ready to go.

 

\---

 

Caleb was never exactly sure why he’d taken the coat.

Then again, even the edges of his perfect memory sometimes frayed like cheap paper when something uncommonly _fucking awful_ happened. So as to his justification for expanding his repertoire into grave-robbing (there was nowhere left to go in the better class of sins - he was, after all, already an accomplished murderer) he only remembered thinking that it would be a waste to leave it.

The whole thing had rather been a waste. 

He could certainly count on selling it later, having come away with all the better parts of a circus con-man’s pitiful earthly belongings. After, all the periapt had been worth 50 gold. And the coat was made of good cloth, if a bit patchwork up top - there was even satin in the lining. 

Everything else had been worthless. Upon closer examination (when he was dragging the pliant, heavy corpse) the deceased’s ridiculous tall boots had been re-soled twice before and his remaining original scimitar was made of cheap carnival glass - only his own unique magic could make it useful. 

Anyway the periapt remained around Caleb’s neck, hidden under his ragged scarf and the coat remained in the satchel that he’d taken off a dead guardsman in the sewers of Zadash. He’d wrapped in some of the cleaner rags he owned, as much to protect it as to hide it from sight, and there it stayed though their arrival into Shady Creek Run proper - which predictably proved to be a desolate shithole.

Caleb didn’t forget about it exactly, but there were a lot of other things to focus on in the next few days.

It didn’t really come back into his awareness until he was using his satchel as a pillow the night before their final fight with the Shepherds. 

He’d slept. He actually slept through the night, the exhaustion must have caught up to him. 

In any case he’d cracked his crusted eyes open to faint dawnlight and the smell of fading rose oil and patchouli in his nose. He’d slept, and woken up, and found that an un-nameble mixture of emotions had used his guts for an alchemist’s still and the result had forced out everything, even the tremors out of his hands, even his cowardice.

In the end it was all for the best that he’d ended up more on the front line of the fight than what he was comfortable with. 

There had been an opportunity. 

He’d taken it. The bastard burned.

 

\---

 

Of course Caleb then had an even better chance to do the right thing, at the second, more ‘official’ memorial. To give the coat to someone more appropriate, Yasha maybe. 

(Or perhaps he had given rightful weight to the possibility that in her vast and all-consuming grief the very, very powerful Celestial woman might remember that it was mostly Caleb and Nott who had come up with the plan that got her best friend killed, and then cut their heads off and give them to the Stormlord as ugly paperweights). 

He could have placed it back on the grave marker and burnt it in effigy. 

Everyone else was full of meaningful gestures and kind, useless words, and correct facial expressions. Caleb didn’t have a single word left in him, pretty or otherwise. He felt empty, he missed his cat, his ankles were cold.

But then Mr. Clay the firbolg (who would be continuing on with them apparently, gods help the man) had stepped in and said a few words and the simple stick marker had sprouted some branches and roots and a smattering of colorful moss and purple mushrooms that could almost be mistaken for flowers.

And Caleb was still a coward and a fundamentally a selfish person, so like any good con man he used he moment. When everyone’s eyes were off him he stuck his hand into the satchel to stroke at the coat, to warm his fingers a little. In the end he said nothing and kept it and carried it away.

 

~


End file.
